NSA phone spying document declassified

The Obama administration Wednesday declassified in part a key court order authorizing and setting the rules for the National Security Agency’s collection of records on billions of telephone calls made by Americans.

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The order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court sets a five-year limit on storage of the call data, restricts access to “personnel with appropriate and adequate training” and states that the data can be searched based only on a “reasonable and articulable suspicion.”

However, the court does not approve each query to the database. In addition, the Obama administration deleted from the public version of the order most details about what sort of evidence could constitute an association with terrorism and result in a search of the call data. The names of terrorist groups the program is focused on also appeared to have been redacted.

The order, along with two previously classified congressional briefing documents on surveillance programs, were disclosed in connection with a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the controversial efforts.

In testimony prepared for the hearing, NSA Deputy Director John Inglis revealed that in 2012 the intelligence organization submitted 12 reports to the FBI based on the call-tracking database. Those reports contained fewer than 500 phone numbers, Inglis said.

Administration witnesses at the hearing continued their recent struggle to provide examples of cases in which the call-tracking database — often called Section 215 after the PATRIOT Act provision used to authorize it — was key to preventing a terrorist attack in the United States.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) pressed for hard numbers of terrorist plots averted by the program, saying he was “far from convinced” that it had been critical on that front.

“That’s a very difficult question to answer in that that’s not necessarily how these programs work,” Inglis said. He said one case in which the program had been critical — a case that would most likely not have been made “but for” the call-tracking database — was the successful prosecution of several men in San Diego for support of the Al-Shabaab jihadist group in Somalia.

Leahy suggested officials had muddled the numbers by combining those involving call-tracking with another program that allows U.S. officials to intercept Internet traffic linked to foreigners.

“Safe to say there are not 54 ‘but fors’?” Leahy asked, referring to reported successes of the call-tracking program.

FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce said the call-tracking program had also “played a role” in dismantling a plot to bomb the New York City subway, but he acknowledged that law enforcement was already onto the plot and that its key players before the metadata program provided an additional phone number for one of the conspirators.

“I’m not saying that it is the most important tool,” Joyce said. However, he pled with lawmakers not to shut down the program.

“We need all these tools,” said Joyce. “It plays a crucial role in closing the gaps and seams that we fought hard to gain after the 9/11 attacks. … We must have the dots to connect the dots.”

Those kinds of statements clearly rankled Leahy, who said law enforcement could always craft a rationale for intruding on Americans’ privacy.

“We could have more security if we strip-searched everybody who came into every building in America. We’re not going to do that,” the chairman said. “We could have more security if we closed our borders completely to everybody. We’re not going to do that. If we put a wiretap on everybody’s cellphone in America, if we searched everybody’s home — at some point, you have to know where the balance is.”

Leahy complained that the documents released Wednesday did not include court opinions concluding that all Americans’ telephone records are “relevant” to terrorism investigations.

“It does not contain any real analysis of the 215 relevance standard,” the chairman said.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) also focused on the “relevance” issue, arguing that the word was being stretched beyond its widely accepted meaning in order to allow the government to gather information on virtually every phone call made in America.